8.4 Versailles Conference and Peace Settlement

The conference opened in January 1919, dominated by the Big Four: Woodrow Wilson (United States), David Lloyd George (Britain), Georges Clemenceau (France) and Vittorio Orlando (Italy). The defeated powers and Soviet Russia were not invited to negotiate.

• War guilt: Article 231 made Germany accept responsibility for the losses caused by the war, which became the legal basis for reparations.
• Reparations: the total was set in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks, a sum many Germans considered impossible.
• Military limits: an army of no more than 100,000 men, no air force, no tanks or submarines, a tiny navy, and a demilitarized Rhineland occupied by Allied troops.
• Territory: Alsace-Lorraine returned to France; land to the new Poland, including a corridor to the sea that separated East Prussia; Danzig became a free city; the coal-rich Saar went under League control; union with Austria was forbidden.
• Colonies: all German colonies were taken.

Separate treaties dealt with Germany's allies. Austria and Hungary became small separate states, and Hungary lost about two-thirds of its territory under the Treaty of Trianon (1920), leaving millions of Hungarians outside its borders. New or restored states included Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The new borders followed self-determination only in part: Czechoslovakia contained about three million Germans in the Sudetenland, and nearly every new state had unhappy minorities. Most of these successor states began as democracies, but by the late 1930s most of them, apart from Finland and Czechoslovakia (until 1938), had been battered by economic slumps, border quarrels and unstable coalition politics and had turned authoritarian (8.6). The Ottoman Empire's treaty was later revised after Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal fought for and won better terms in 1923.

The League was meant to prevent war through collective security, in which members would act together against an aggressor. It started weak. The U.S. Senate rejected the treaty, so the United States never joined. Germany was admitted only in 1926 and the Soviet Union in 1934. The League had no army and needed unanimous decisions for most actions.

Former German colonies and Ottoman Arab lands became mandates, territories governed by Allied powers under League supervision, supposedly until they were ready to rule themselves. Britain received Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan; France received Syria and Lebanon. The system extended British and French power in the Middle East, and with it their stake in controlling the region's trade routes and oil. To many Arabs and other colonized peoples who had heard Wilson's talk of self-determination, mandates looked like colonialism under a new name.

The British economist John Maynard Keynes argued in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) that the reparations would wreck Germany's economy and Europe's with it. Many Germans called the treaty a dictated peace. Because the new Weimar Republic's leaders had signed it, nationalists attacked the republic as illegitimate, and the war guilt clause and reparations weighed on its politics and finances; that resentment helped the Nazis later. Other historians argue the treaty was less harsh than the one Germany imposed on Russia at Brest-Litovsk, that Germany remained Europe's strongest economy, and that the real problem was that the victors failed to enforce it. A strong essay acknowledges both views.